Japh saidIt’s not a perfect analogy, but hopefully it illustrates the point.

Yes it does, thank you.

What you at Envato might have underestimated, is the siege-mentality in FOSS, especially GPL (they have good reasons for that).

Now, from a legal standpoint I absolutely see your point. Taking the perspective what the GPL intends and what effects your actions have on that, it’s quite a diferent matter.

Now all they say is if you have a different interpretation then you can’t possibly represent their interpretation. This is a fact I don’t see how one can deny.
They just don’t want to give any impression that “80% free” was still within what they try to tell the software world. It isn’t.

Yet this quite harmless no-brainer is the trigger for people to say that WP rips them of their freedoms.
I’m not sure if you have an idea how infuriating such a statement alone is in the FOSS world, especially given that they tried to enforce you to give your members more freedom.

But be it as it may, I see your point. My only advice is : let it settle here and show a bit of gratitude that they feel more like giving you 100%.
Don’t go “wolf in sheep’s clothes’ and ‘they are just fighting one of their bigger competitors’ or ‘No one gains nothing from wordpress’ and such disrespectfull trash talk.

Caldazar said
especially given that they tried to enforce you to give your members more freedom.

there is no freedom in selling a theme one time then is free for everyone.

maybe you didn’t get the point.

the people who created wordpress and ask for 100% GPL are the same people who created a business in selling the use of themes without giving the users the code for those themes so they can modify and distribute them for free.

The amount of hypocrisy here is amazing.

When all the premium themes sold on wordpress com will be freely available for everyone to use, share, modify and distribute under GPL license we can have all this debate about how evil envato is and how all the authors here are greedy and bad people.

The authors who sell premium themes on wordpress com should be banned from that wordcamp event. They will do this?

What you at Envato might have underestimated, is the siege-mentality in FOSS, especially GPL (they have good reasons for that).

Now, from a legal standpoint I absolutely see your point. Taking the perspective what the GPL intends and what effects your actions have on that, it’s quite a diferent matter.

Now all they say is if you have a different interpretation then you can’t possibly represent their interpretation. This is a fact I don’t see how one can deny.
They just don’t want to give any impression that “80% free” was still within what they try to tell the software world. It isn’t.

Yet this quite harmless no-brainer is the trigger for people to say that WP rips them of their freedoms.
I’m not sure if you have an idea how infuriating such a statement alone is in the FOSS world, especially given that they tried to enforce you to give your members more freedom.

But be it as it may, I see your point. My only advice is : let it settle here and show a bit of gratitude that they feel more like giving you 100%.
Don’t go “wolf in sheep’s clothes’ and ‘they are just fighting one of their bigger competitors’ or ‘No one gains nothing from wordpress’ and such disrespectfull trash talk.

+1 Have to agree. Without these strict movements, some day the entire WP org’s activity may look like someway biased towards commercial benefits. Hard to digest but to be honest, we (Envato and authors) are completely different breed from FOSS.

doru said
the people who created wordpress and ask for 100% GPL are the same people who created a business in selling the use of themes without giving the users the code for those themes so they can modify and distribute them for free.

If you can’t find them then the authors of those theme should get banned from wordcamp.

I don’t have time for this stuff but with some research one can check who did those premium themes and if some of them speak at wordcamp, then he should ask for those authors to get banned from the conference

I don’t know what you’re being sarcastic about, you said: “I want them for free since the themes must be 100% GPL”. GPL doesn’t force you to publicly distribute your code.
You could take all your custom functions out of your theme and put them on a hosted service that can only be accessed via API. In such case, you’re selling the access to those functionalities for the theme. ref